The director of the Office of Countering Violent Extremism at the State Department outlined some of the department’s strategic planning Wednesday to counter “violent extremism.”

Irfan Saeed praised Denmark’s strategy of rehabilitating and reintegrating foreign extremist fighters into society, asking, “What happens when they come back? You have to be able to rehabilitate them and then re-integrate them back into society.”

Speaking at a National Academy of Sciences’ panel on “Ideologically Motivated Violence,” Saeed described rehabilitation and integration as a strategy area of focus for the State Department.

“We’ve seen a large number of individuals travel overseas to foreign conflict zones, places like Iraq and Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan,” Saeed said. “So what happens when they come back? You have to be able to rehabilitate them and then re-integrate them back into society.”

He cited the program in Aurhus, Denmark, “where they’ve really struggled with this issue, but they’ve come up with a comprehensive way to try to rehabilitate these individuals once they come back and then reintegrate them into society.”

Saeed discussed other strategies to counter violent extremism during the panel including intervention which he described as “something as simple as offers or alternatives to prosecution.”

“It’s one thing to throw everybody in jail and figure it out later,” he said, but officials “understand that we can’t arrest our way out of this problem.”

He also emphasized the importance of “strategic messaging,” arguing that “we figure if we can put some good messages on the internet, we can stop radicalization violence.”

He cited the work of the State Department’s new Global Engagement Center, which is charged with “coordinating U.S. counterterrorism messaging to foreign audiences” and was established by Executive Order in March.

Irfan Saeed is a Senior Policy Advisor at the US Department of Homeland Security, Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Mr. Saeed advises DHS leadership on policy isues at the intersection of civil rights and homeland security, developing and coordinating activities relating to countering violent extremism. Prior to joining Homeland Security, Mr. Saeed worked as a Criminal Prosecutor, at the state and federal levels. Mr. Saeed worked as an Assistant United States Attorney, US Department of Justice, in the Eastern District of Louisiana, as well as an Assistant District Attorney, in New Orleans, Louisiana. He served as Resident Legal Advisor at US Embassies in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. While deployed to the US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, he was tasked to develop the Community Engagement Office, the first of its kind in U.S. Embassies worldwide, to use traditional public diplomacy tools to counter violent extremism (CVE) in Pakistan.

Based on the continuing violence against women and non-Muslims in Pakistan, that effort could be classified as an utter failure.

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Yet, that got Saeed promoted to the State Dept.

Based on the growing number of jihadis and deadly jihad attacks in the U.S., he clearly isn’t generating a return on investment in the U.S. either.

Irfan’s name popped up in the Creeping Sharia archives back in 2010 when he attended Obama’s White House Ramadan feast (i.e., Month of Jihad) with many Muslim Brotherhood luminaries including Huma Abedin’s mother.

Anyone who understands the Dept. of State would not be surprised by such a worldview. It is a nasty collection of villany and depravity moderated only by individual ambition and egoism. Promotion is based on how closely you mirror the views of your superiors so change or a diversity of approaches does not exist. They simply clone themselves.

Can anyone point out one diplomatic achievement in the past 50 years that didn’t cost the US billions and improved the lot of the American people?

Treaties are written that cannot be enforced and are never meant to be. The people who develop disasterous polices are never held accountable, they just go on to bigger and better posts.

State should be eliminated. No government listens to an American ambassador and the US embassies serve no useful fuunction. Doubt me, try and get hep from one of them when overseas.

We spend billions on useless embassies and a staff divided between incompetent civil services types who hate foreign service officers and an arrogant foreign service officer corps who have a knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. This expertise is reflected in what the WH reads when it has to be informed. State’s intelligence products usually line the bird cage because our embassies use the cocktail circuit to pass rumors instead of working to develop real knowledge.

So is it any surprise that policies such as this are what passes for State’s wisdom?

Reintegrating returning jihadis. Discarding home coming veterans
You’re right Veritas the system has been corrupted by fear and greed. it urgently needs an enema. Mr. Trump knows just where to insert the hose.